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YouTube Begins Using HTML5 Instead of Flash for Default Video Playback
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When the iPhone came out:
- Flash was considered essential enough at the time, that even Apple's pocket journalist Mossberg at first wrote that it was coming "very soon" for the iPhone.
- One reason Jobs didn't like Flash was because it would mean anyone could create and distribute interactive apps to the iPhone, without Apple being able to act as the app "orifice" (as he described other walled gardens) for them.
- Jobs claimed the iPhone could show "the real internet", which of course was false since so many sites used Flash (and many still do). He even went so far as to use modified copies of websites to hide the effect of this lack. E.g. at the upper left you can see the faked Nat Geo site used by Jobs in a keynote, with the "Requires Flash" warning painted out:
- And of course, Google really helped, by eventually converting the entire YouTube library over to H264 just so iPhone owners would not be left out.
At last!
I can finally stop switching my user agent to iPad to use YouTube! That took a long time.
P.S.: It also works fine with Safari 7 on Mavericks, I don't know why the press release mentions Safari 8 and Yosemite.
edit: I was signed up for the "HTML5 playback" option but strangely enough some videos still refused to play but played fine with my user agent switched to iPad.
I can finally stop switching my user agent to iPad to use YouTube! That took a long time.
P.S.: It also works fine with Safari 7 on Mavericks, I don't know why the press release mentions Safari 8 and Yosemite.
edit: I was signed up for the "HTML5 playback" option but strangely enough some videos still refused to play but played fine with my user agent switched to iPad.
Not the first time Walt was wrong. Nor the last.
When your revenue model hinges on ads, excluding a large percentage of page views is just bad business. It's as simple as that.
(And it certainly didn't help when Adobe killed Mobile Flash for Android in 2011.)
Good point.
Many Android phones still come with it, and it's still quite handy when I am searching and run across a site that uses Flash.
OTOH, I found that when I am using iOS, I tended to avoid places that don't work, and sometimes am unable to see news videos.
It's not quite dead yet, but getting there.
Seriously, this makes a difference to so many people?
All you ever needed to do was install ClickToPlugin and it would have automatically loaded HTML5 instead of a Plugin whenever possible (whether it was Flash or Silverlight or any other plugin).
Anyways, sweet.
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All you ever needed to do was install ClickToPlugin and it would have automatically loaded HTML5 instead of a Plugin whenever possible (whether it was Flash or Silverlight or any other plugin).
Anyways, sweet.
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There was no app store when the iPhone first launched. Steve Jobs specifically said that all people would want would be web apps, written in JavaScript.
He was overestimating how quickly it would be possible to replicate native apps on the web though, by about a decade. Only now, with Unity 5 being able to deploy to iOS 8 via Safari, no plugins required, is it finally true that any app can be delivered via the web, and there's little reason to make native applications anymore.
It didn't include all the videos. I tried it, and only about half were in HTML5. Doesn't matter, I later used Click2Flash to kill YouTube player entirely and load the MP4 with the Quicktime plugin. No ads, no throttling when paused.
By the way, the HTML5 player is slow like the Flash one. Many PPC Macs struggle with YouTube's players, so people hanging onto PPC Macs find ways to load them in Quicktime instead. Probably the only advantage the HTML5 player has over the Flash one is that you don't need to update Flash every week to use it.
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It already effectively did that for me by becoming outdated and being blocked. I was too lazy to update.
We should get an updated one fairly soon, seeing as the Android app has been updated with material design.
I don't get why you find that so implausible, that's the exact reason I ditched it and have never shown any even mediocre interest in going to YouTube at all... and I've managed to live my life more than perfectly adequately so well without it so far, I see no reason to change that now ... Too little to late imho
PPC Macs still handle HTML5 a lot better than Flash. Flash is so heavy it manages to make even my Retina iMac get hot.
For PPC Macs I use an application called YouView to handle YouTube, it plays 480p video quite smoothly on my PowerBook G4.
Look, my comment was honest. But to be clear, I dont consume videos of cats doing stupid pet tricks. I dont watch music videos. So not using YouTube is not an issue -- although I will admit that when they are imbeded in a new article or blog, I may be actually watching youtube.
But yes, I completely de-installed all Adobe products from my Mac so even when the video was in the imbeded website, it would give me an error. If I really wanted to see the video, I would have to go to the developer tab and switch the client to ipad. Most of the time I just moved on and did not see the video. But going to youtube directly -- never. I dont really like cats. I am more of a dog person.
So now maybe I will watch a few more imbeded videos in the sites I go to, but I dont really have a need/desire to go hang out in the youtube site.
It's good to see Flash slowly decline in use. Everybody who uses Flash should have a program that converts Flash code to HTML5. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, "The browsers that matter don't make devs use Flash, and the ones that make devs use Flash don't matter."
That's why I quit going to youtube as well.
1. The crappy software needed to run it.
2. Mostly trash content by & for trashy people.
Just another of a billion sites offering us worthless distraction in exchange for our valuable time and attention. This site is as close as I'm getting to that.
Dramatic much? I turned on HTML 5 in the Youtube settings years ago. It's been an option. Now it's default. That's all their saying.